


The Only Door

by orphan_account



Category: Murder in the Red Barn - Tom Waits (Song)
Genre: Coming of Age, Gen, New England Gothic, Small Towns, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 11:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6984004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old Chenoweth's daughter returns to Winter-kill, twenty years later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Door

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Measured_Words](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured_Words/gifts).



Winter-kill, New Hampshire is about a hundred square miles of timber and dairy farm, with barely one kind soul to spread over all that land. I like to think that Winter-kill lost one of them when I left.

But I’m not sure anymore. It’s been over twenty years since I ran away from Winter-kill, and I don’t remember that last night. I remember getting into Granddad’s truck and resting my slippery hands on the steering wheel for a long time before I turned the keys. Then I drove for hours and hours. The gas ran out. I hitched a ride with a man who kept a gun in the glovebox.

There was enough cash in his wallet to get me far enough. I was eighteen. I’m forty now, all grown-up and shaking because I got a letter from Winter-kill. Granddad had died and left the property to me. The goddamn barn and the house I was born in. He never reported the truck stolen, but we’d never talked since. How his lawyer found me was something I’d have to fix. It was a worthless inheritance and I almost threw the letter away, except for how it made me smell smoke and metal, hear rustling over straw.  

I needed to fill up the hole in my head with what really happened, and I needed to go to Winter-kill for that. So I said goodbye to my family, got into my car—my nice new car, one that’d never seen a snow—and drove for hours and hours. It was autumn in Winter-kill, and the trees had turned to a standing blaze, red and yellow leaves sparking beneath the tall, snowcapped mountains. I passed the same weathered sign for Winter-kill that’d been there when I left, though some kid had spray-painted an ‘s’ on the end.

The town square had changed even less than the sign. Dairy bar, movie rental, grocery store, and a post office. Everything else you had to leave town for. Even going to school was a half hour’s ride down to the regional. I pulled in to the dairy bar’s parking lot, tucking my car right next to a four-wheeler. Inside was the teen who’d driven the four-wheeler, and Reba. She used to be a waitress, but she looked like she owned the place now. Twenty years had been hard on her, greyed her hair and deepened the scowl lines around her mouth. 

“Hey, Reba,” I said.

She took one look at me before replying, “Lammas Chenoweth’s girl.”

“Right.”

I sat down at the picnic table where I’d carved my initials when I was fourteen. Reba shooed the kid outside and settled across from me. Her initials were next to mine, because we used to be friends.

“You certainly aged well,” she said. “Getting out looks good on you.”

“The property’s mine now.”

“I know.” Reba took out a cigarette and lit it up. I pushed the table’s ashtray towards her. Her lips tightened into a polite smile as she took her first inhale. “Are you tearing it down?”

“I was just going to leave it.”

“After what happened?”

Reba’s smoke was tugging at my memory. My eyes had been burning that night too, I knew that. “What happened, Reba?”

“Don’t bullshit me,” she replied with a snort. “You were there.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, I didn’t see it. But the next day, you were gone, and so was that man old Lammas took in. Mariah said she saw Lammas soon after, burying something in the woods. Looked like a man’s shirt. We’ve all got our theories about that night. Mine was that you wandered off with that guy and a drifter came, tried to mug you both and had his throat slit. Lammas hid the evidence. But that’s not what happened, was it?”

I felt tight down from my throat to my gut. The man Granddad had taken in. I could picture his face, maybe. Frightened. We weren’t in the woods. I shook my head, and Reba tapped her ashes into the tray.

“You should tear the place down,” Reba said. “No one ever went up there—you know how Lammas was with everybody but you. Mean as hell, gave Cal that scar on his face just for looking at you wrong, even if Cal’d never admit to being beaten by an old man. That boy I chased out was the one who found his body. He was exploring with his friends and there was Lammas on the floor, mostly bones. Who knows how long he’d been dead. Maybe the winter got him.”

“There weren’t any signs of violence?”

Reba exhaled smoke. “No. You think there oughta be?”

Looking down at my initials, I held back from saying “I don’t know” again. Reba tossed me her lighter.

“In case you decide to finish burning the place down,” she said. “Now get out or order something.”

My body made its decisions for me again, and I rose to leave. I got back in my car and waited a long time before I turned the key. It was nice to have dry hands this time around, nothing slick and warm dripping from the wheel down to my thighs. Only two roads led out from the town square, and I turned onto the left one. The battered pavement curved past most of the farms up here. It wasn’t cold enough yet to bring the cattle in, so they were grazing on the slowly dying grass. Six farms and as many thick stands of trees, and I found the dirt road which led to the land that was now mine.

I saw the house first. The white paint was peeling off the clapboard and half the windows had been smashed in. None of it was as bad as the hole in the sunken roof, hosting a family of ravens. I could see the shadow of the red barn creeping towards the house as the sun set, but I wasn’t ready to go there yet. Even though nobody was here, I locked my car when I got out.

With its smashed lock, the rotting door swung open when I pushed on it. I heard something skitter away on its paws as the ravens croaked a warning. Kids had made a hide-out of the place—there were beer cans littering the floor and the furniture had been idly destroyed. There never was much to do in Winter-kill. A dark spot, man-shaped, was on the wooden floor.

Where Granddad must have decayed. I didn’t feel anything, even when I kneeled down and touched the stained wood. Scraped some of it up under my nails and held it under my nose, hoping the smell would trigger a memory. When it didn’t, I wiped my hands on my jeans and walked out.

The path to the barn was overgrown with witchgrass taller than my knees. Twenty years had been softer on the barn’s red paint than the houses. It almost looked like it’d been touched up. There weren’t any other signs of time either. The kids had stayed away. I shoved my hands in my pockets as I stepped through the open door, fingers tight around Reba’s lighter.

At first I couldn’t see anything as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then I could pick out all the old farming implements, down to the sickle Granddad has used to cut the grass. He’d kept cattle, like everybody else up here. Cows hadn’t been here in years though, and when I think of how much I used to help him, I don’t think he could keep them after I had left. Not even an animal smell was left behind.

Chains were coiled up against the far wall, seeming to rest like something alive. I felt them down in the place that kept me going when I drove away from Winter-kill. I knew them, how heavy they were. Attached firmly to the strong wall of the barn, and they wouldn’t break no matter how you struggled. Because I saw him struggle, saw the man strain and beg, wondering what he’d done to deserve this. His eyes were red from the smoke. It was cleansing, Granddad had said, part of this whole thing that had to be done. The man had helped them out with the farm, lived in the shack Granddad had surrounded with the burning herbs and ran out half-blind and full-helpless.

I came into the red barn twenty years ago and reached out for the axe, just like I was doing now. The axe had been clean then, sharpened carefully. It was dull now, rusted into uselessness.

“It’s time for you to grow up, girl. There's always some killing you got to do,” Granddad had said to me.

What had I been doing? Crying, I think, with my hands around the axe haft. I kept looking at the man’s eyes, wondering why it was necessary. Had the man ever hurt me? Said an unkind word?

“You’re safe from him, sweetie. Now take the axe, and cut like I showed you.”

I did. It was almost like slaughtering a calf, if I didn’t think about it. And I hadn’t thought about it since then, when I dropped the axe on the floor and took Granddad’s truck keys. He could’ve stopped me, but he didn’t. Blood on the seat, blood on me, and blood seated deep inside my head. Granddad had wanted me to succeed, and he’d done it. I left Winter-kill afraid of nothing but myself.

Axe in hand, I walked back to the car. The axe I put next to me in the passenger seat, where I could keep an eye on it. There was another long drive ahead of me. I have a daughter, and she’ll need to grow up soon.


End file.
